Important: Safety Warning
This recipe calls for animal brains or related nervous-system tissue. Cattle brain and spinal tissue can transmit bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the cause of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, which is fatal and has no treatment.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Sheep's Brains, Roasted or Baked
Four or six brains will be required for a dish. Prepare the brains as for stewing, and procure as many slices of bacon as there are brains. After the brains have been boiled and thrown into cold water, drain and dry them perfectly; brush over with oil, and roll them in highly-seasoned bread-crumbs. Put them on the bacon in a Dutch oven before the fire, or bake in a well-heated oven, turning them about that they may be equally cooked, and basting them occasionally. When they are nicely browned, take them up. Lay the slices of bacon on toast, put the brains upon them, and send sharp sauce or tomato sauce to table in a tureen. Time to bake, thirty to forty minutes. Probable cost, 2s. Sufficient for six or seven persons.
This is a recipe, and a fairly typical Victorian one, but it belongs to the class of dishes that cannot be reproduced today. The notes below explain the hazard and unpick the period vocabulary rather than adapting the method.
- The hazard is the tissue itself, not the cookingBrain and spinal cord are the tissues in which transmissible spongiform encephalopathy agents concentrate. Scrapie in sheep and goats is the oldest recognised disease of this family, and prions are not destroyed by roasting, boiling, or any temperature a domestic oven reaches. No cooking time makes the ingredient safe.
- Why this cut is restrictedFollowing the BSE epidemic, sheep and goat skull contents including the brain, from animals over twelve months old or with a permanent incisor erupted, along with spinal cord and certain other tissues, were designated specified risk material in the UK and EU and must be removed and destroyed rather than sold for food. Brain from mature sheep of the kind this recipe assumes is therefore not lawfully available from a butcher in those jurisdictions.
- Quantity and exposureFour to six whole brains served to six or seven people is a substantial portion of high-risk tissue per diner. The Victorian assumption that offal was cheap protein for a crowd is precisely what makes the dish unsuitable now; if you want a crumbed and baked offal dish, use a current recipe built around a permitted cut.
- "Prepare the brains as for stewing"In period cookery this generally meant soaking to draw out blood, stripping the membrane and blanching. The step is recorded here for completeness only, and involves the same handling risk as the finished dish.
- Dutch oven before the fireIn Victorian British usage a Dutch oven was an open-fronted tin reflector set on the hearth, not the lidded cast-iron pot the term means in America today. It roasted by radiant heat from the fire, which is why the recipe calls for turning and basting -- though it offers baking in a well-heated oven as an alternative.
- Sharp sauceGenerally a vinegar-based, piquant sauce meant to cut rich or fatty meat. Tomato sauce here is a thin cooked sauce sent separately in a tureen, not a condiment.
- Probable cost, 2sTwo shillings for a dish feeding six or seven marks this as an economical entree. Cassell's quotes a probable cost for its recipes throughout.
Brains were standard nineteenth-century kitchen economy across Europe: cheap, quick to cook, and prized for a texture that no other cut gives. Cassell's treats them as unremarkably as it treats sweetbreads or tripe, offering them, as here, brushed with oil and rolled in crumbs and roasted on bacon over toast, a construction that pairs a soft interior with a crisp coating and a salty base. The sharp or tomato sauce sent alongside follows the old rule that rich offal wants acid. The dish's disappearance from British and American tables was not a matter of taste but of regulation: the BSE crisis of the late 1980s and 1990s led to the specified risk material rules that removed ruminant brain from the food chain, and a recipe that any Victorian cook could buy the makings of for two shillings became one that a butcher, depending on jurisdiction and the age of the animal, may not legally supply.